Published 2 years ago
by
Ben Kendrick
, Updated May 16th, 2012 at 8:35 am,

A couple weeks back we got official word from BioWare that they were winding down the, at the time, weekly Mass Effect 3 multiplayer events – so as to provide more interesting and diversified “operations.” As a result, the team would instead be creating targeted multiplayer events every other week – offering everything from bonus XP to chances for especially rare weaponry.

While no official statistics were revealed, the last event “Operation: Exorcist” was (apparently) a success – meaning that over 1,000,000 Cerberus Phantoms were killed in action. This weekend sees a similar challenge – albeit a little tougher – as the team at BioWare is setting N7 operatives on one of the toughest enemies in the game, calling for the heads of over 3,000,000 Banshees in “Operation: Silencer.”

The official announcement was posted today on the official BioWare blog – with “Operation: Silencer” set for Friday, May 11 at 6:00PM PST until Monday, May 14 at 5:00PM PST. While Xbox 360 and PC players may be tiring of the “Kill X amount of Y” type events – this is only the second multiplayer operation open to PS3 games (who were, for the first month, sidelined from the action).

Here’s the full run-down of “Operation: Silencer” challenges – followed by the respective rewards.

Goals:

Allied Goal: Kill 3,000,000 banshees

Squad Goal: Survive until a full extraction on any map against any enemy on gold difficulty.

Rewards:

Successful completion of the allied goal will grant all players a Victory Pack.

Successful completion of the squad goal will grant all squadmates a Commendation Pack.

BioWare notes that while PS3 players will not see the promotion screen – they will be enrolled in “Operation: Silencer” and, upon completion of goals, will be rewarded accordingly when BioWare releases the Victory and Commendation packs early next week.

The post also teases the addition of Vorcha reinforcements into the multiplayer mix:

This task is an onerous one, and many of you are right to dread contact with these particular foes, but rest assured that we are prepared to reinforce your battalion with reserves. The vorcha want in, and as soon as they complete combined-arms training with our technically-skilled personnel, we will let them loose.

However, at this time, it’s unclear whether or not this would indicate new unlockable Vorcha class characters or the addition of Vorcha NPC’s – to help even the odds. While new characters are always enticing – it’s probably more likely, at this point, that every player squads will see the addition of a few extra NPC’s on the battlefield.

No doubt, for many players, the multiplayer “Operations” are an enjoyable excuse to revisit Mass Effect 3; however, one criticism that we covered in our Mass Effect 3 review is that, despite being a lot of fun, the multiplayer in the game is very limited – a problem that has been brought to light as the developer recycles the same premise for the “Operations.” How hard would it be to have set-up a different “promotion” mission type – where the game does more than simply track whether or not the community can accomplish certain goals without actually altering the minute-to-minute gameplay? For example, the gameplay on the event weekends is entirely unchanged from normal play but what if BioWare had created a separate selection in the mission select options – something that allowed for major changes to the gameplay (i.e. “Operation: Silencer” could have pit players against ONLY banshees – not just count the amount of enemies that get killed).

You can check out the latest Mass Effect 3 community stats in the image below:

Again, the Mass Effect 3 multiplayer, despite a lot of initial detractors, has turned out to be a pretty enjoyable offering; however, here’s hoping that, as BioWare had previously promised, moving the events to every other weekend would allow the team to “create and execute the best possible Operations for the community.” Right now, instead of improving the experience by providing quality over quantity – many Mass Effect 3 multiplayer veterans would likely argue that the team is merely providing the exact same quality in less quantity.

2 Comments

I’m hoping they add some kind of dimensionality to their multiplayer. It’s literally the same thing, over and over. It’s dull and I haven’t missed it since the last time I popped the disc in a month or so ago.